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Category Archives: Politics
What I missed at the 2nd Inauguration of President Barack H. Obama
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
Boo-wah-boo
Another tea-bagger whines about paying taxes:
“It wasn’t until the last year that we made a decent amount of money for the first time,” he said. “Then I got nailed with taxes. And I think that is what has a lot of people frustrated with the current system: you’re being punished for thriving.”
Song Adopted by Cain’s Campaign Also Aims to Be a Tea Party Anthem
By EDWARD WYATT
Published: October 16, 2011
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
Political Thought of the Day
I encourage all my fellow Tea Partiers to join Occupy Wall Street protesters in their non-violent, peaceful protests and together demand that the Government be returned to the people. After all, this is precisely what the Tea Party was intended to be before it was taken over and marginalized by the establishment politicians.
Fascinating. What will the 2012 elections look like if elements of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street actually converge? The established political parties have had their chance at trying to define a new American consensus, and failed miserably, even with a grave crisis at their back to justify action and compromise. Could a confrontation between Tea Party and OWS factions succeed where the established parties have failed? Is this precisely the populist door many have been waiting years to open?
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
Political Thought of the Day
Photo by Columbia Tristar/Getty Images
There’s lots of reasons to keep Rick Perry out the “country club,” but Barack Obama, only one.
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
Jeb Bush is just another demagogue blowhard
- Why is this man an “expert” on education?
Appearing alongside Cory Booker on the “Education Nation” special edition of this morning’s Morning Joe, former governor Bush jumped in when Booker was asked why teachers make less in Newark than they do in affluent school districts.
“Simple,” Bush said. “It’s collective bargaining agreements.”
Now, aside from being ridiculous on its face — really, teachers’ collective bargaining rights are the reason Newark teachers’ salaries are 1/3 as much as Scarsdale teachers? — Local 481 really wants to stick it to its rank and file, eh? — notice the change in meme here. It’s no longer “teacher unions are corrupt” or “teacher unions are too powerful.” No, now it’s “collective bargaining rights” themselves that are the problem. Take away teachers’ collective bargaining rights, and all of a sudden everything’s going to be right with American education?
Alongside Laura Bush’s push for the MBA-ification of school principals, one can see these “reformers” education agenda for what it is: a program for the corporatization of the public school system, with at-will employee teachers, little or no room for job security or workers’ rights, power concentrated at the top, and the bulk of resources committed to “solutions-oriented” third-party vendors like the Educational Testing Service and Microsoft. It’s a program for turning the public school system into another teat in the already grotesque corporate welfare system.
In the aftermath of Ohio and Wisconsin, the Republican showdown with America’s workers and working class is being framed as a great victory. Alongside efforts nationwide to suppress minority and youth voting — oh, please argue that Republican politicians lay awake at night worrying about the “epidemic” of voter fraud — and the Republican agenda for the near future of the United States is achingly clear.
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No taxes
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No collective bargaining
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No voting rights
This reactionary program, adopted wholesale and nationally, should be called what it is: Reactionary. There’s nothing conservative about it. And through one, powerful wing of the so-called “education reform” movement, today’s reactionary Republicans are busy — very busy — making public schools the next front line in their crusade — their very own “children’s crusade” — to preserve and protect the privileges and assets of America’s new have-it classes, against all the rest of us.
“America is in Decline” — if you don’t believe me, will you believe Harold Bloom?
“Twenty-first century America is in a state of decline. It is scary to reread the final volume of Gibbon these days because the fate of the Roman Empire seems an outline that the imperial presidency of George W. Bush retraced and that continues even now. We have approached bankruptcy, fought wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor. Our troops include felons, and mercenaries of many nations are among our ‘contractors,’ fighting on their own rules or none at all. Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. It we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastate our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and deprecates intellectual values, even in the universities.”
– Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence (2011).
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
A Moment of Zen–In Honor of Wisconsin’s Public Employees
Left photo: Wisconsin Tourism Board; Right photo: unknown.
Please click below:
America the Beautiful, performed by Katherine Lee Bates and Adesso: http://www.alcorngallery.com/adesso//
Posted in Politics, The American Experience
Egypt liberato
Egypt meets hope. We Americans can take pride in a new foreign policy vision that is truly democratic, historically informed, mindful of unintended consequences and less willing to suffer the explicit abridgment of human rights in the name of our own, narrow national interests.
“There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom,” the President quotes Martin Luther King to remind us how today’s Egyptians’ struggles are so like our own. And the soul rejoices, too, in the measured, grown-up, forward looking response of our grown-up, measured President. He offers nothing less than a new hope that the events of the past weeks suggest that America’s conflict with the Muslim world has been the historical abberation, and not a cultural or historical inevitability. And he inspires the hope that Americans may yet come to better understand our most basic commonality not just with the Egyptians of Tahrir Square, but with the common peoples of the whole world: our common yearning to be free.
A brilliant speech, well worth watching in full:
Posted in Politics, The American Experience, Uncategorized
Mubarak and Berlusconi
Due vecchi che hanno oltre il periodo consentito loro giorni.
Posted in Politics, Uncategorized
Inspirations and Aspirations 